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Stewart Shapiro's ambition in Vagueness in Context is to develop a comprehensive account of the meaning, function, and logic of vague terms in an idealized version of a natural language like English. It is a commonplace that the extensions of vague terms vary according to their context: a person can be tall with respect to male accountants and not tall (even short) with respect to professional basketball players. The key feature of Shapiro's account is that the extensions of vague terms also vary in the course of conversations and that, in some cases, a competent speaker can go either way without sinning against the meaning of the words or the non-linguistic facts. As Shapiro sees it, vagueness is a linguistic phenomenon, due to the kinds of languages that humans speak; but vagueness is also due to the world we find ourselves in, as we try to communicate features of it to each other.

Roy Sorenson offers a unique exploration of an ancient problem: vagueness. Did Buddha become a fat man in one second? Is there a tallest short giraffe? According to Sorenson's epistemicist approach, the answers are yes! Although vagueness abounds in the way the world is divided, Sorenson argues that the divisions are sharp; yet we often do not know where they are. Written in Sorenson'e usual inventive and amusing style, this book offers original insight on language and logic, the way world is, and our understanding of it.

Roy Sorenson offers a unique exploration of an ancient problem: vagueness. Did Buddha become a fat man in one second? Is there a tallest short giraffe? According to Sorenson's epistemicist approach, the answers are yes! Although vagueness abounds in the way the world is divided, Sorenson argues that the divisions are sharp; yet we often do not know where they are. Written in Sorenson'e usual inventive and amusing style, this book offers original insight on language and logic, the way world is, and our understanding of it.

When did Rembrandt get old? Such questions eventually lead us to the problem of vagueness. Williamson traces its history, questions conventional theories and defends the realist view that vagueness is a kind of ignorance.

When did Rembrandt get old? Such questions eventually lead us to the problem of vagueness. Williamson traces its history, questions conventional theories and defends the realist view that vagueness is a kind of ignorance.

Have you ever felt confused trying to understand a tough Gemara? Have you ever dreamed of an approach that will help you get clarity? Vagueness Vanquished presents a proven strategy based on the Rishonim and Achronim, in a concise and straightforward fashion, which will help one to understand any piece of Gemara.For beginners and experienced learners as well.

Stewart Shapiro's ambition in Vagueness in Context is to develop a comprehensive account of the meaning, function, and logic of vague terms in an idealized version of a natural language like English. It is a commonplace that the extensions of vague terms vary according to their context: a person can be tall with respect to male accountants and not tall (even short) with respect to professional basketball players. The key feature of Shapiro's account is that the extensions of vague terms also vary in the course of conversations and that, in some cases, a competent speaker can go either way without sinning against the meaning of the words or the non-linguistic facts. As Shapiro sees it, vagueness is a linguistic phenomenon, due to the kinds of languages that humans speak; but vagueness is also due to the world we find ourselves in, as we try to communicate features of it to each other.

Gently read hardcover, with clean text, solid binding. One-inch tear at back jacket corner. Ready to ship.

Awarded the 1988 Johnsonian Prize in Philosophy. Published with the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For most early pragmatists, including the founder C.S. Peirce and L. Wittgenstein, vagueness was a real and universal principle and not a mere defect of our knowledge or thought. This volume begins by exploring this pragmatist notion of vagueness and the way it was tied to their basic opposition to various kinds of reductionism and nominalism. It then develops towards an analysis of Peirce’s original and wide views on vagueness, as seen through the angles of logic, semiotics, epistemology and metaphysics. In the final part of this book, the reader is presented with a case for the contemporary relevance of such a realistic pragmaticism for the ongoing debate on semantic, epistemic and ontic vagueness.

A studied, yet extremely readable history of St Kitts, an island which has changed hands several times over its turbulent history. This is the first full length history of the island, from first human settlement up to independence and beyond.

A studied, yet extremely readable history of St Kitts, an island which has changed hands several times over its turbulent history. This is the first full length history of the island, from first human settlement up to independence and beyond.

Saving Truth from Paradox is an ambitious investigation into paradoxes of truth and related issues, with occasional forays into notions such as vagueness, the nature of validity, and the G:odel incompleteness theorems. Hartry Field presents a new approach to the paradoxes and provides a systematic and detailed account of the main competing approaches. Part One examines Tarski's, Kripke's, and Lukasiewicz's theories of truth, and discusses validity and soundness, and vagueness. Part Two considers a wide range of attempts to resolve the paradoxes within classical logic. In Part Three Field turns to non-classical theories of truth that that restrict excluded middle. He shows that there are theories of this sort in which the conditionals obey many of the classical laws, and that all the semantic paradoxes (not just the simplest ones) can be handled consistently with the naive theory of truth. In Part Four, these theories are extended to the property-theoretic paradoxes and to various other paradoxes, and some issues about the understanding of the notion of validity are addressed. Extended paradoxes, involving the notion of determinate truth, are treated very thoroughly, and a number of different arguments that the theories lead to "revenge problems" are addressed. Finally, Part Five deals with dialetheic approaches to the paradoxes: approaches which, instead of restricting excluded middle, accept certain contradictions but alter classical logic so as to keep them confined to a relatively remote part of the language. Advocates of dialetheic theories have argued them to be better than theories that restrict excluded middle, for instance over issues related to the incompleteness theorems and in avoiding revenge problems. Field argues that dialetheists' claims on behalf of their theories are quite unfounded, and indeed that on some of these issues all current versions of dialetheism do substantially worse than the best theories that restrict excluded middle.

This book presents a strong case for substance dualism and offers a comprehensive defense of the knowledge argument, showing that materialism cannot accommodate or explain the 'hard problem' of consciousness. Bringing together the discussion of reductionism and semantic vagueness in an original and illuminating way, Howard Robinson argues that non-fundamental levels of ontology are best treated by a conceptualist account, rather than a realist one. In addition to discussing the standard versions of physicalism, he examines physicalist theories such as those of McDowell and Price, and accounts of neutral monism and panpsychism from Strawson, McGinn and Stoljar. He also explores previously unnoticed historical parallels between Frege and Aristotle, and between Hume and Plotinus. His book will be a valuable resource for scholars and advanced students of philosophy of mind, in particular those looking at consciousness, dualism, and the mind-body problem.

The first major descriptive study of linguistics vagueness - arguably the strategies of which constitute a key aspect of communicative competence of native speakers of English. This study shows how English provides its speakers with a great variety of ways of being vague and draws on naturally-occurring data to examine syntactic, intonational, semantic, and pragmatic considerations of vague language.

Hud Hudson presents an innovative view of the metaphysics of human persons according to which human persons are material objects but not human organisms. In developing his account, he formulates and defends a unique collection of positions on parthood, persistence, vagueness, composition, identity, and various puzzles of material constitution.The author also applies his materialist metaphysics to issues in ethics and in the philosophy of religion. He examines the implications for ethics of his metaphysical views for standard arguments addressing the moral permissibility of our treatment of human persons and their parts, fetuses and infants, the irreversibly comatose, and corpses. He argues that his metaphysics provides the best foundation in the philosophy of religion for the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body.Hudson addresses a broad range of metaphysical issues, but among his most strikingly original contributions are his defense of the "Partist" view (according to which a material object can exactly occupy multiple, overlapping regions of spacetime) and his argument for the compatibility of Christianity with a materialistic theory of human persons.

Originating as an attempt to provide solid logical foundations for fuzzy set theory, and motivated also by philosophical and computational problems of vagueness and imprecision, Mathematical Fuzzy Logic (MFL) has become a significant subfield of mathematical logic. Research in this area focuses on many-valued logics with linearly ordered truth values and has yielded elegant and deep mathematical theories and challenging problems, thus continuing to attract an ever increasing number of researchers. This two-volume handbook provides an up-to-date systematic presentation of the best-developed areas of MFL. Its intended audience is researchers working on MFL or related fields, who may use the text as a reference book, and anyone looking for a comprehensive introduction to MFL. Despite being located in the realm of pure mathematical logic, this handbook will also be useful for readers interested in logical foundations of fuzzy set theory or in a mathematical apparatus suitable for dealing with some philosophical and linguistic issues related to vagueness. The first volume contains a gentle introduction to MFL, a presentation of an abstract algebraic framework for MFL, chapters on proof theory and algebraic semantics of fuzzy logics, and, finally, an algebraic study of Hájek's logic BL. The second volume is devoted to Łukasiewicz logic and MValgebras, Gödel-Dummett logic and its variants, fuzzy logics in expanded propositional languages, studies of functional representations for fuzzy logics and their free algebras, computational complexity of propositional logics, and arithmetical complexity of first-order logics.

This is the first comprehensive treatment of subjective logic and all its operations. The author developed the approach, and in this book he first explains subjective opinions, opinion representation, and decision-making under vagueness and uncertainty, and he then offers a full definition of subjective logic, harmonising the key notations and formalisms, concluding with chapters on trust networks and subjective Bayesian networks, which when combined form general subjective networks. The author shows how real-world situations can be realistically modelled with regard to how situations are perceived, with conclusions that more correctly reflect the ignorance and uncertainties that result from partially uncertain input arguments. The book will help researchers and practitioners to advance, improve and apply subjective logic to build powerful artificial reasoning models and tools for solving real-world problems. A good grounding in discrete mathematics is a prerequisite.

Originating as an attempt to provide solid logical foundations for fuzzy set theory, and motivated also by philosophical and computational problems of vagueness and imprecision, Mathematical Fuzzy Logic (MFL) has become a significant subfield of mathematical logic. Research in this area focuses on many-valued logics with linearly ordered truth values and has yielded elegant and deep mathematical theories and challenging problems, thus continuing to attract an ever increasing number of researchers. This two-volume handbook provides an up-to-date systematic presentation of the best-developed areas of MFL. Its intended audience is researchers working on MFL or related fields, who may use the text as a reference book, and anyone looking for a comprehensive introduction to MFL. Despite being located in the realm of pure mathematical logic, this handbook will also be useful for readers interested in logical foundations of fuzzy set theory or in a mathematical apparatus suitable for dealing with some philosophical and linguistic issues related to vagueness. The first volume contains a gentle introduction to MFL, a presentation of an abstract algebraic framework for MFL, chapters on proof theory and algebraic semantics of fuzzy logics, and, finally, an algebraic study of Hájek's logic BL. The second volume is devoted to Łukasiewicz logic and MValgebras, Gödel-Dummett logic and its variants, fuzzy logics in expanded propositional languages, studies of functional representations for fuzzy logics and their free algebras, computational complexity of propositional logics, and arithmetical complexity of first-order logics.

Saving Truth from Paradox is an ambitious investigation into paradoxes of truth and related issues, with occasional forays into notions such as vagueness, the nature of validity, and the G:odel incompleteness theorems. Hartry Field presents a new approach to the paradoxes and provides a systematic and detailed account of the main competing approaches. Part One examines Tarski's, Kripke's, and Lukasiewicz's theories of truth, and discusses validity and soundness, and vagueness. Part Two considers a wide range of attempts to resolve the paradoxes within classical logic. In Part Three Field turns to non-classical theories of truth that that restrict excluded middle. He shows that there are theories of this sort in which the conditionals obey many of the classical laws, and that all the semantic paradoxes (not just the simplest ones) can be handled consistently with the naive theory of truth. In Part Four, these theories are extended to the property-theoretic paradoxes and to various other paradoxes, and some issues about the understanding of the notion of validity are addressed. Extended paradoxes, involving the notion of determinate truth, are treated very thoroughly, and a number of different arguments that the theories lead to "revenge problems" are addressed. Finally, Part Five deals with dialetheic approaches to the paradoxes: approaches which, instead of restricting excluded middle, accept certain contradictions but alter classical logic so as to keep them confined to a relatively remote part of the language. Advocates of dialetheic theories have argued them to be better than theories that restrict excluded middle, for instance over issues related to the incompleteness theorems and in avoiding revenge problems. Field argues that dialetheists' claims on behalf of their theories are quite unfounded, and indeed that on some of these issues all current versions of dialetheism do substantially worse than the best theories that restrict excluded middle.